Amid new GI Bill woes, VA says fix is coming - Air Force News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Air Force Times

Amid new GI Bill woes, VA says fix is coming

As new problems surface with Post-9/11 GI Bill payments, Veterans Affairs Department officials told a Senate committee they are hoping for faster claims processing and more accurate payments by December, when they deploy a fully automated claims system.

In Wednesday testimony before the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, VA’s top education official said an audit of the new veterans education program is under way to determine how many payment errors may have been made and how to fix them.

Keith Wilson, director of VA’s education service, said the single biggest problem in paying tuition, living stipends and other benefits of the new GI Bill is that the payments are complex, requiring manual calculation until an automated software system is developed. The fully automated claims system could be available by November, Wilson said.

Among the new snags for the troubled program: Living stipends for the spring term are all wrong, based on 2009 rather than 2010 military housing allowance rates.

As a result, in July VA will need to figure how who was underpaid, who was overpaid, and what to do about it. The underpaid are expected to receive retroactive benefits, back to the start of the term, but VA officials have not said what they will do in cases of overpayments. That would occur in places where the military housing allowance, on which the living stipend is based, has declined.

Wilson said VA is paying the wrong rates because it is not able to quickly update its computer system to reflect the revised military housing allowances, which took effect Jan. 1. This is an issue that will be resolved in late June with the deployment of the next phase of the automated claims system, Wilson said.

Incorrect payments are not building veterans’ confidence in the program, which has had a number of problems since its Aug. 1 launch.

“I know if I owed the VA money, which I do, they would certainly be in quite a hurry to collect, which they are. But, when the VA owes me money, I cannot seem to get any answers,” said Columbia University student Marco Reininger, who testified at the hearing on behalf of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

Mark Anderson, a full-time student at Columbia College in Missouri in addition to his daytime police training, said in an interview that he is losing $117 a month because the Post-9/11 GI Bill living stipend he is receiving is based on the 2009 rate for Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., rather than the 2010 rate.

“I contacted VA twice, and each time they said that the computers have not been updated to the new rates and they are unsure of when they will [be],” Anderson said. “I know there must be more veterans out there with the same problem.”

VA also is having issues with the $3,000 living stipend advance payments that it made last fall when start-up problems surfaced with the new GI Bill.

VA records show that 121,095 people received a total of $355.5 million in advance payments, and efforts are under way to recoup the money from recipients.

Dan Osendorf, director of VA’s debt management center, said about $73 million of the money has been returned and about 22,000 students have contacted VA to arrange repayments. Those who have not contacted VA are having their living stipends reduced by $750 a month, starting with April 1 payments. VA will try to track down others who received the money.

Two problems with that effort have emerged:

* VA mistakenly took too much money from the April benefits of about 6,000 students. “That glitch has been fixed,” Osendorf said.

* VA is unable to say how many people who received the $3,000 payments may have committed fraud by receiving the money even though they were not enrolled in college. Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, ranking Republican on the veterans committee, said he has been trying, without success, to get more information, but he believes thousands of veterans wrongly received money.

Wilson said an audit of GI Bill payments by the VA inspector general is looking at that issue, along with other possible payment problems.